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In her first novel, Half His Age, Jennette McCurdy follows Waldo, a ravenous seventeen-year-old who fixes her want on a married creative writing teacher. It's a coming-of-age character study with teeth: funny, mortifying, and angry, for readers who want their literary fiction raw rather than tidy.
The Review
Anyone who read I'm Glad My Mom Died knows McCurdy can build a voice that takes hold and won't let go, and the good news is that voice survives the jump to fiction. Waldo narrates Half His Age the way teenagers actually think when no one's watching: fast, contradictory, embarrassing. She's horny and bookish and lonely and cruel and tender, sometimes in the same paragraph, and McCurdy refuses to soften her into someone more sympathetic. That refusal is the whole point. This is a girl who wants to be seen, and the novel makes you sit inside the desperation of that wanting without ever flattering it.
The premise sounds like a thousand age-gap dramas, but McCurdy isn't writing romance and she isn't writing a cautionary pamphlet either. Mr. Korgy isn't a brooding seducer. He's a man with a paunch, a mortgage, and dreams that quietly died years ago, and the novel's sharpest move is letting Waldo see him clearly while wanting him anyway. The power dynamics are never abstract here. You feel them in small scenes: a comment about a story she wrote, a held glance, the way attention from an adult lands on a kid who's starving for it. McCurdy understands that the danger isn't always dramatic. Sometimes it's just being noticed.
What surprised me is how funny it is. The humor runs dark and physical, built on the kind of cringing, too-specific detail that makes you wince and laugh at once. There's also a current of rage running under the whole book, aimed less at any one man than at a culture that teaches girls to perform desire and then punishes them for it. That anger spills past the affair, too. Waldo moves through a world choked with cheap stuff and dead ambition, and the novel keeps catching how easily real hunger gets swapped for the disposable kind. The prose is lean and precise, sentences that land and move on, no decoration. When the emotional charge hits, it hits because McCurdy has earned it through accumulation, not through speeches.
The story goes to uncomfortable places and doesn't offer easy resolution or moral cleanup. That's a feature, but it's worth naming. Readers who want clear villains, a redemptive arc, or a heroine they can root for cleanly may find Waldo hard to spend a whole book with. She's abrasive on purpose, and the discomfort is sustained rather than relieved. Given the bleakness, I suspect some readers will wish for a little more air between the harder scenes. But for those who like fiction that unsettles in service of something true, this is a confident, fearless turn into the novel form.
Half His Age is best read as a portrait of a particular kind of girlhood, the wanting, the shame, the hunger to matter, rendered by a writer who clearly remembers exactly how that felt. It won't comfort you. It will make you uneasy, make you laugh, and make you angry, often all at once. What stays with me is how unwilling McCurdy is to let Waldo off the hook, or to let the reader off it either.
Reviewed by Avery